Radeon HD 3850 X2 vs Radeon RX 460 2GB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 460 2GB, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1090 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 460 2GB is 6% quicker than the Radeon HD 3850 X2 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		112000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		105984 MB/sec
	Difference: 6016 (6%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 460 2GB will be much (more or less 186%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3850 X2. (explain)

Radeon RX 460 2GB		61040 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 39664 (186%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 X2 should be much (about 23%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 460 2GB, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 X2		21376 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 460 2GB		17440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3936 (23%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.